The Magic Touch

August 1, 2024

Once upon a time, my daughter Ella couldn't read.

The sooner a person learns to read, the sooner the Sparkling Door to Bright New Adventures opens, so I was excited to introduce my kids to letters when they were preschoolers. But Ella's learning didn't track with traditional milestones, and her indifference to reading on her own at age 4, 5, and 6 was difficult for me. The fact that we were homeschooling was both a blessing and a curse: She didn't experience the low self-esteem that can come from being compared with others, but it meant that the responsibility was all ours to get her where she needed to be. It wasn't fun. I kept looking for a magic strategy, but never found one. As time went on, I clung to the fact that she was in fact progressing, even if slowly. Fortunately, by the time she was about 12, she was reading at grade level.

Now Ella reads more than the rest of us, and she told us recently that she can remember the time before she could. I was waiting for a compliment about how my teaching wizardry finally brought Ella to books, but what actually did it, she says, was simply the fact that we had so many books around our house, and that we'd regularly go to the library and get even more. The rest of the family would just pick up a book and get obvious pleasure from it, and eventually Ella decided that she wanted to have that experience too. It was that simple.

So it turns out the Magic Touch came from the books themselves, from being surrounded by them, from opening them and smelling them, from looking at the pictures and turning the pages, and from seeing how happy they made the rest of us. Ella's story gave me a fresh appreciation for what it means to surround kids with lots of good things that are enjoyed by people they respect. It also reminded me of the special world that is free and open to all: our local libraries. And that you can't smell a Kindle.

Of course, there's no certainty about what the future holds, no matter how hard you try to give your kids everything they need to become their best grown-up selves. Ella is now a filmmaker—in other words, a professional storyteller. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for happily ever after.

—Deb